The offseason can never wait. A couple of weeks ago, with the Grizzlies down 0-2 to the Clippers, a smattering of eulogies to the Z-Bo-era Griz sprouted up. This week, with the team in the middle of a second-round series and it long established that Lionel Hollins’ coaching future would not be dealt with until after the playoffs, speculation on that subject has popped back to the top of the Griz-topic queue.
The news peg for the latest flare-up is that the Nets have been reported as a team with interest in Hollins. This kind of story was inevitable. I know of one other franchise that has at least discussed Hollins and have had a third suggested to me by someone with connections to that organization. There’s nothing surprising in any of this. Hollins will be a coaching free agent of sorts with lots of jobs out there to be filled and would make a pretty splashy hire for a lot of teams. I would imagine that any team with an opening would be having internal discussions about him as a potential candidate.
Locally, Hollins’ future with the Grizzlies has tended to be written about and discussed in simple terms: He’s done a great job and he deserves to be back next year. But while I ultimately believe both of those assertions to be true, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I wrote about the coaching question at considerable length about a month ago, but now seems like, if not a “good” then perhaps an inevitable time to dig a little deeper into some of the points I made then.
